Ship of Fools: A Taylor Varga Omake (Complete)

[E M Berner]

The problem would come though, that a train needs to be connected together for efficiency in acceleration and braking.
But it's shown in Atlantis that an entire vehicle needs to enter the wormhole before it will be transmitted (that episode where they first encounter the wraith's ancestor bug, and the puddle jumper gets stuck partway into the gate).
So all your train carriages would need to be decoupled before reaching the wormhole, and that's also assuming that the gate can actually handle something _longer_ than a standard size puddle jumper...

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You don't need full sized trains. Using purpose built light rail cars where each car has a small battery and electric motor and a simple computer could give you a system that drove through the stargate in convoy automatically and then separated onto different tracks according to the cargo type or destination they carried. Since the rail cars don't have to travel more than 10 kilometers per side of the wormhole they wouldn't require very much energy storage and charging during loading/unloading would be easy.

A full sized train wouldn't fit through a Stargate anyway so some sort of transhipment center would have to exist on each side. Why not use that and simply automate the entire train setup. Passengers could simply hop on to passenger cars and ride to their destination. The gate dials a planet automatically and the rail cars move on their own to their destination, having queued up beforehand. In 38 minutes you could move megatons of cargo in this way.

Each planet would have a transhipment center commensurate with the amount of cargo handled there, Earth would have one measured in tens of square kilometers but some little naquada mining colony might only send 20 rail cars a month and passenger cars might have to route through a transit hub planet to get back to earth (unless you want to wait for the once a month direct connection).

In all ways such a system would be superior to any ship based system, unless you have asgard teleporters and massive ships. But then again the rail setup would be very scalable and would probably be significantly cheaper per transported ton.

Edit: ooh, just had a thought. The transhipment center would easily double as a customs station to handle screening for drugs and stuff in case a lutian alliance type situation develops on a colony.

Edit2: scanners for the cargo could probably be loaned from the asgard or another advanced civilization much easier than weapons tech.

 

[MTB]

Using purpose built light rail cars where each car has a small battery and electric motor

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Use overhead contact lines, no battery required.

 

[Derek M]

Pretty sure a collaboration between Linda and Taylor could make DHD which goes in your back pocket... If Kevin got involved they might be able to make it a general-purpose portal-device remote power-source and control - so it'll work on just about any remote-controllable portal/gate/wormhole set-up they might run into...

Could be tricky, but they might even make one that can recharge from both industry-standard micro-USB or Apple phone chargers, using the same socket!

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Between Kevin, Linda and Taylor, they could make a Sliders style portable wormhole device that would be a lot more practical than the one from the show. The primary reason NOT to do that would be a) the problem when somebody else gets a hold of it -- Saurial seems to have a habit of leaving her tools behind to be grabbed by klepto Norse gods, and b) having a remote mission control is a lot more flexible in terms of support and responsiveness, assuming it is set up properly.

 

[Derek M]

LAST WORD ON TRAINS FROM ME: The Stargate allows you to move a metric Kaiju-load of stuff from one planet to another. The primary limitation of it is the whole, "only one Stargate at a time on a planet," thing. There are logistics algorithms that undoubtedly would allow you to optimize that -- and one obvious solution is to just set a bunch of automated cross-transit hubs in deep space above the galactic plane. If the SGC can build Midway station to get back and forth to the Pegasus galaxy, I'm sure an Asgard-level power could do more.

However, the Asgard had ships that could go at ludicrous speed. They can fly from the Ida galaxy to the Milky Way in a few hours. Keep in mind that according to Web sources, the Ida galaxy is four million light years away. The Milky Way is just a smidgen over 100,000 light years across, so the Asgard can pop pretty much anywhere in a galaxy in the same time it takes me to go to the Home Depot down the street. Pegasus is about 3 million light years away, and the Daedalus could do that in about 18 hours with a ZPM.

One thing I've learned writing this fic is that travel times in Star Trek are hideously slow when compared to the Stargate universe. The primary advantage of the warp drive is that it allows FTL maneuvering in realspace rather than hyperspace.

 

[DW75]

However, the Asgard had ships that could go at ludicrous speed. They can fly from the Ida galaxy to the Milky Way in a few hours. Keep in mind that according to Web sources, the Ida galaxy is four million light years away. The Milky Way is just a smidgen over 100,000 light years across, so the Asgard can pop pretty much anywhere in a galaxy in the same time it takes me to go to the Home Depot down the street. Pegasus is about 3 million light years away, and the Daedalus could do that in about 18 hours with a ZPM.

One thing I've learned writing this fic is that travel times in Star Trek are hideously slow when compared to the Stargate universe. The primary advantage of the warp drive is that it allows FTL maneuvering in realspace rather than hyperspace.

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Yeah, it's really outrageous and was fiddled with repeatedly so that FTL worked at the speed of plot more than anything else. It's really bullshittium at its worst.
That along with zats gaining disintegrate ability just because the plot of ONE episode needed it is one of the rather few real lowpoints of the series that i REALLY wish they had been more careful about.

 

[E M Berner]

Yeah, it's really outrageous and was fiddled with repeatedly so that FTL worked at the speed of plot more than anything else. It's really bullshittium at its worst.
That along with zats gaining disintegrate ability just because the plot of ONE episode needed it is one of the rather few real lowpoints of the series that i REALLY wish they had been more careful about.

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In trek they had that speed-of-plot thing down to a science. Their sensors could reach light years instantly (no lag, light speed or otherwise) but if you actually sat down to calculate the time it would take to travel the distance even at warp 9.9 it was like hours at the very best... the crises you detected had a very good chance of being over by that time.

 

[FaerieKnight79]

In trek they had that speed-of-plot thing down to a science. Their sensors could reach light years instantly (no lag, light speed or otherwise) but if you actually sat down to calculate the time it would take to travel the distance even at warp 9.9 it was like hours at the very best... the crises you detected had a very good chance of being over by that time.

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Considering how stupidly good the scanners and communications systems are (even in the original series), and the fact that time travel is not only a thing but happens with disturbing frequency... It's possible the sensors and communications systems can pick up distress signals and such from crisis that haven't happened yet. Thus how the Enterprise, Defiant, or Voyager can always arrive early enough to actually help out.

 

[Ace Dreamer]

You don't need full sized trains. Using purpose built light rail cars where each car has a small battery and electric motor and a simple computer could give you a system that drove through the stargate in convoy automatically and then separated onto different tracks according to the cargo type or destination they carried. Since the rail cars don't have to travel more than 10 kilometers per side of the wormhole they wouldn't require very much energy storage and charging during loading/unloading would be easy.

A full sized train wouldn't fit through a Stargate anyway so some sort of transhipment center would have to exist on each side. Why not use that and simply automate the entire train setup. Passengers could simply hop on to passenger cars and ride to their destination. The gate dials a planet automatically and the rail cars move on their own to their destination, having queued up beforehand. In 38 minutes you could move megatons of cargo in this way.

Each planet would have a transhipment center commensurate with the amount of cargo handled there, Earth would have one measured in tens of square kilometers but some little naquada mining colony might only send 20 rail cars a month and passenger cars might have to route through a transit hub planet to get back to earth (unless you want to wait for the once a month direct connection).

In all ways such a system would be superior to any ship based system, unless you have asgard teleporters and massive ships. But then again the rail setup would be very scalable and would probably be significantly cheaper per transported ton.

Edit: ooh, just had a thought. The transhipment center would easily double as a customs station to handle screening for drugs and stuff in case a lutian alliance type situation develops on a colony.

Edit2: scanners for the cargo could probably be loaned from the asgard or another advanced civilization much easier than weapons tech.

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Using the Tokra tunnelling tech you could set-up your many-world railway cargo net even on worlds where the Goa'uld occasionally come and go through the Stargates...

Dial a Stargate, the far end underground installation scans the area and near Space, and if things are clear raises a train terminal from the ground and unfolds rails to the Gate. Then, sends a very low power encrypted radio message 'OK' through the Gate. And, your train rolls through and straight underground, and/or local train heads the other way after a Gate reset. If unclear then same time delay as 'safe' before sending a 'No Go' message. Cycle the Go/No Go messages so clever Goa'uld can't hack the system too easily.

Cue some really confused Goa'uld about where the locals get supplies from, and how they export whole populations off-world.

From a SoF viewpoint, you really want to see if Family tricks will let you duplicate those Tokra crystals, ASAP...

 

[Ace Dreamer]

In trek they had that speed-of-plot thing down to a science. Their sensors could reach light years instantly (no lag, light speed or otherwise) but if you actually sat down to calculate the time it would take to travel the distance even at warp 9.9 it was like hours at the very best... the crises you detected had a very good chance of being over by that time.

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There's actually a range/speed trade-off in the use of subspace for comms (and, likely, sensors). If you want real-time comms (fractions of a second delay) then the maximum range for ship-to-Starbase is about 25 light years (at billions of times light speed), but, if you send a message you plan to cross a good chunk of the galaxy it will take decades before it is received.

Sensors detect subspace disturbance - don't use subspace tech and range unless in a full power active sensor sweep is likely light-minutes, not years. So, if you want to kill starship a subspace tech free anti-matter minefield...

Of course, if you talk to Miles O'Brien about this his first reaction will likely be "Isn't that obvious?". Then, he'll probably sit down and start looking at his preconceptions, logic, and some of the otherworld tech SoF has run into...

 

[944tim]

Hm? I definitely remember the episode where they moved active stargate from SGC to space.
And orbital stargates...

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sounds like a recipe for sudden loss of atmosphere on any planetary based stargate.

 

[Firethorn]

Use overhead contact lines, no battery required.

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That would require overhead contact lines on both sides, not just rails. I figure that once you start using rail systems with stargates, you're probably going to have primary, secondary, and tertiary shipment points. Overhead wires are expensive, at least today, compared to batteries that only need a couple km worth of range.

Earth - Primary point, maximized cargo movement. No expense spared.
Secondary - Switching yard, basically. Designed to be able to take a maximum speed shot from earth, break it up, and ship the individual cars on to their individual destinations. Little expense spared.
Tertiary - basically a rail spur. Minimal infrastructure necessary to be able to take a car or three, unload and load them, then shove them back through on occasion. Probably also handle the occasional completely unimproved site, where you're using a truck or even hand packing packages through the wormhole.

Mind you, I think that you'd initially see SGC becoming a spur, with 2-3 other spurs, just to be able to move a large amount of cargo to secondary sites easily. Over time the rail amount would grow, speeds would increase, etc... As the amount of cargo moving(both ways) comes to dominate the gate traffic. It would also be very close to the point where SGC's scouting missions would move to a secondary site off Earth for, well, numerous reasons. Whatever site they move to would have a spur, of course, but you're going to want a site that has relatively little scheduled traffic in order to be available for emergencies.

sounds like a recipe for sudden loss of atmosphere on any planetary based stargate.

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Not if the stargates are set up to not move random air particles. Otherwise, with a one-way system, even just standard atmospheric pressure would create tornado/hurricane force winds just from random contacts with the horizon with atmospheric molecules. If the horizon simply bounces such small particles like a solid wall would, you'd get the observed effects.

 

[E M Berner]

sounds like a recipe for sudden loss of atmosphere on any planetary based stargate.

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If you recall the episode where the Russians set up their own stargate program it's explained that the gate doesn't care about atmospheric effects between gates. In that episode one end was under water and the other in earth normal atmosphere, it would have made for a horizontal geyser at dial in if that wasn't the case.

 

[Jormuungaand]

sounds like a recipe for sudden loss of atmosphere on any planetary based stargate.

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I'd assume the Alterans DID think of that one, and programmed the gate itself to limit entry to suitably solid objects discrete from the background atmosphere so as to prevent exactly that when stepping between gates on planets where the barometer readings don't match exactly. They did seem to think of these day to day issues, even if they didn't plan for a gate in downright weird situations.

 

[FaerieKnight79]

I'd assume the Alterans DID think of that one, and programmed the gate itself to limit entry to suitably solid objects discrete from the background atmosphere so as to prevent exactly that when stepping between gates on planets where the barometer readings don't match exactly. They did seem to think of these day to day issues, even if they didn't plan for a gate in downright weird situations.

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Then again they also missed some rather important details due to it just never occurring to them that the Stargates would outlast their own existence as a corporal species. They also did some rather idiotic things like creating one intergalactic threat in an attempt to fight another intergalactic threat. Then opting to NOPE out of mortal existence (and insist on non-interference), thus leaving both those intergalactic threats for others to deal with. Leaving their Clarktech behind without a care, thus allowing a parasitic race of snake-like creatures to become a galactic threat is another of their major mistakes. Oh, and only partly booting Anubis back to being mortal after deciding to Ascend him to begin with. Also, their unwillingness to deal with the threat of the Ori, which they them self created and could best stop.

EDIT: To be honest, the bulk of the Anchients getting wiped out alongside the Ori at the end of Stargate SG1 served them right. They could have cleaned up the messes they left behind. Instead they stuck their collective heads in the sand, and punished members of their species that did want to clean up the mistakes (such as Anubis).

 

[Laranor]

Are you still discussing stargates and transportation through them?

 

[Derek M]

Are you still discussing stargates and transportation through them?

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Kind of all types of FTL travel. Wormholes, whether they be gate-based or free-standing drives, are just punching a shortcut through the universe. Other options, which I believe is how the Asgard teleporter worked, is to just fold space like a piece of paper so the two points are congruent, then shift the mass over. I'm not sure, but I think the revised BSG jump drives were supposed to work like that. Other options, like Star Trek teleporters, travel effectively at the speed of information, so you theoretically could use them to travel FTL if the transfer medium was sufficient. Note that supposedly Star Trek computers use warp fields on their computer cores to make processing FTL. Quantum communicators like in Mass Effect could also do the same, theoretically.

Mass Effect also used the eponymous effect to travel FTL in real space by lowering the mass of the vessel...somehow, via space magic. Trek warp drives just twist the space itself. Star Wars, Stargate, and probably a bunch of other universes use an alternate dimension where the rules of travel time vary. The old Traveler RPG had an interesting take on that, where travel time was consistent regardless of distance traveled. I think Halo's slipstream drive is sort of similar, but I'm not as familiar with that franchise. David Brin's Uplift series actually had multiple levels of hyperspace, and travel through some layers could have interesting memetic-related effects.

The final way of space travel in FTL that I can think of off the top of my head would be simply editing reality so that you are in a different place. Brin had a species called the Episiarch that was capable of this. You could argue that this is how Q gets around, as well, in Star Trek. I'm not sure if the TARDIS works this way, though it is pretty damned close. Note that if you have this level of control over reality, you're pretty close to god-like in power in the setting.

For this fic, Stargate and Alien universes use hyperspace, Star Trek uses warp, the superhero universes use multiple ways of getting around from a teleportation perspective, usually with inherent limitations. Leet can build anything once, so all of the above are theoretically within his grasp.

 

[Sanabalis]

Infinite Improbability Drive is also a very good option.

 

[FaerieKnight79]

Infinite Improbability Drive is also a very good option.

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Only if you have the exact odds of how improbable such a drive is, a finite improbability drive (commonly used to make everyone's underwear in a party jump to someone else in said party), and a really strong cup of tea. And I'm sure Leet's shard has no idea how to build a finite improbability drive. Or even what improbability is. After all, if the shard was capable of manipulating an improbability's chance of occurring, the Entities would be capable of such an event. And if that was possible, it is a near certainty they would have used it already to achieve their goal of infinite food and infinite living space.

 

[Neruz]

Other options, which I believe is how the Asgard teleporter worked, is to just fold space like a piece of paper so the two points are congruent, then shift the mass over.

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Asgard Transporter or 'Beaming' works by 'breaking the target down into its base atoms, then transporting them to the desired location and reassembling them', which isn't a very physics congruent description but is vaguely the same way the Star Trek Transporters work.

Given that both methods cause the targets to glow with light and then appear or disappear, I suspect they're intended to be the same thing: Turn target into energy, 'beam' energy to location, turn target back into whatever it was originally. This is also explicitly stated to be how Ring Transporters work, as well as Ancient Beam Transporters, which all have similar visual effects and so are presumably using the same basic method.

 

[FaerieKnight79]

Asgard Transporter or 'Beaming' works by 'breaking the target down into its base atoms, then transporting them to the desired location and reassembling them', which isn't a very physics congruent description but is vaguely the same way the Star Trek Transporters work.

Given that both methods cause the targets to glow with light and then appear or disappear, I suspect they're intended to be the same thing: Turn target into energy, 'beam' energy to location, turn target back into whatever it was originally.

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Or in other words, the person operating the teleporter is killing people every time it activates, and replacing them with a clone.

 

[Neruz]

Or in other words, the person operating the teleporter is killing people every time it activates, and replacing them with a clone.

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Maybe, the tech was originally developed by the Ancients and they figured out ascension, which is definitely pretty soul-ey. So I wouldn't be surprised if it disassembles the soul and beams it along with the rest of the person as well.

 

[FaerieKnight79]

Pretty sure Death would want to have words with anyone responsible for that sort of thing. After all, that's destroying and recreating a soul. Over and over again. Although, they figured out ascension only due to their species being threatened with extinction. And that happened long after their other tech was created.

 

[SamPardi]

Or in other words, the person operating the teleporter is killing people every time it activates, and replacing them with a clone.

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A clone built of the same atoms in the same relative positions, with internal continuity of consciousness. So, in the same way, that you are a clone of yourself from the last discrete moment in time teleported through unknown means into the next discrete moment of time that we would consider the present. Basically, what I'm saying is that so long as your mass-energy is mostly preserved and reassembled correctly, you are not dead, but held in stasis. Only if your body were destroyed and a completely different set of Mass-Energy was used in your creation would you actually be a clone.

Even then, so long as you didn't have a soul, and so long as your unique consciousness was preserved, whether or not you 'died' would be mere trivia anyways.

@Derek M as to the original reason I was going to write a reply. While I'm not deeply into Halo enough to give you the details of Slipstream(Slipspace?), it is functionally the same as Stargate's Hyperspace. Open hole to another dimension, move through another dimension, open hole at end and exit. Slightly deeper down it also resembles The Warp from 40K in that the dimension being traveled through is innately hostile, though in this case more 'you disappear into an eleven-dimensional cloud of free energy' kind of hostile, and that speed of travel is determined by how quickly you can calculate corrections to your 'reality integrity' field. Frankly put, for a Halo style drive, its computational power = speed at FTL.

 

[Pai]

It's not really ascension.. there stuck as floating space squids made of energy. GG guys.

If we're talking fun FTL's in the sword of the stars, Human's made the Node drive. That lets them dive into the circulatory system for the galaxy. Following paths connecting all the stars and large bodies in space.

 

[E M Berner]

Mass Effect also used the eponymous effect to travel FTL in real space by lowering the mass of the vessel...somehow, via space magic. Trek warp drives just twist the space itself. Star Wars, Stargate, and probably a bunch of other universes use an alternate dimension where the rules of travel time vary. The old Traveler RPG had an interesting take on that, where travel time was consistent regardless of distance traveled. I think Halo's slipstream drive is sort of similar, but I'm not as familiar with that franchise. David Brin's Uplift series actually had multiple levels of hyperspace, and travel through some layers could have interesting memetic-related effects.

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A long time ago I read about my favourite ever type of FTL. It consisted of taking a jump out into the unreality that surrounds our bubble of creation and trying to stick a landing at a precise point back in the bubble.

If you jumped to hard you didn't get pulled back and thus became your own little universe. Also the unreality nibbled on your reality the longer you spent there and thus you became less real and less likely to survive the re-entry, you'd be to unreal for reality.

I can't remember the name of the book or the author, if someone knows please say so.

Pretty sure Death would want to have words with anyone responsible for that sort of thing. After all, that's destroying and recreating a soul. Over and over again. Although, they figured out ascension only due to their species being threatened with extinction. And that happened long after their other tech was created.

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So the plague was Deaths way of stopping the idiots before they did something that wasn't fixable to reality and souls?